Goliath

Based on Wikipedia: Goliath

Here's a question that might upend everything you thought you knew about one of history's most famous underdog stories: What if David didn't actually kill Goliath?

Buried in the Hebrew Bible, in a passage most people never read, there's a completely different account. Second Samuel, chapter 21, verse 19, states plainly that Goliath was killed by someone named Elhanan, son of Jair, from Bethlehem. Not David. Elhanan.

This isn't ancient conspiracy theory. It's right there in the text, and it's kept biblical scholars arguing for centuries. Many now believe the original story credited Elhanan with the kill, and that later editors—perhaps uncomfortable with the obscurity of the real hero—reassigned the victory to the more famous David. They wanted a better origin story for their greatest king.

But before we get too far into ancient editorial politics, let's back up and look at the story everyone knows.

The Valley of Elah

The scene unfolds in a valley. The Israelites are camped on one hill, the Philistines on another, with open ground between them. This is Bronze Age warfare, and both sides know the stakes. Whoever controls this territory controls the trade routes, the farmland, the future.

For forty days—twice daily, morning and evening—a giant emerges from the Philistine camp. His name is Goliath, and he's from Gath, one of the five major Philistine cities. The Hebrew text describes him with a curious phrase: a "man of the in-between," meaning he occupied that no-man's-land between the two armies where champions fought.

How tall was he? It depends on which ancient manuscript you trust.

The oldest texts we have—the Dead Sea Scrolls, the writings of the first-century historian Josephus, and the major Greek translations—all agree: Goliath stood about six feet nine inches tall. Impressive, certainly. Intimidating. But not supernatural.

The later Hebrew texts, the ones that became the standard Jewish Bible, inflate this number to nine feet nine inches. Scholars suspect a copyist's error somewhere along the way, possibly when a scribe's eye jumped to the wrong number on a scroll. The smaller figure is almost certainly original.

Six-nine is still formidable. Picture a heavily armored professional soldier, trained from childhood for combat, standing head and shoulders above every Israelite in camp. His bronze armor alone weighed perhaps 125 pounds. He carried a massive spear with an iron point. This was not a man you wanted to fight.

A King Who Wouldn't Fight

The real target of this story isn't Goliath. It's King Saul.

This is something that gets lost in the Sunday school version. The entire narrative is structured to show that Saul—Israel's first king, the man chosen specifically to defend his people against enemies like the Philistines—is a coward and a failure.

The text makes the comparison impossible to miss. Saul himself is described as standing a head taller than anyone else in Israel. He's the obvious choice to answer Goliath's challenge. He has the height, the armor, the weapons, the royal authority. And yet he cowers in his tent, letting his army's morale crumble day by day, morning and evening, for nearly six weeks.

Enter David, a shepherd boy who arrives to bring food to his older brothers.

David hears Goliath's challenge and is baffled that no one has answered it. When Saul finally agrees to let the boy fight, he tries to dress David in royal armor—armor that David rejects. This is another deliberate contrast. Saul's equipment, the narrative implies, is no better than what Goliath wears. Both men trust in bronze and iron. David trusts in something else.

He picks up five smooth stones from a stream. He takes his shepherd's sling. And he walks out to meet the giant.

The Weapon That Changed Everything

Modern readers often picture a child's toy when they hear the word "sling." This is a fundamental misunderstanding.

Ancient slingers were military specialists, and their weapons were devastating. A trained slinger could hurl a stone or lead bullet at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour. Roman military writers described sling bullets penetrating armor, shattering bones, and killing at distances where archers couldn't reach. In some ancient armies, slingers were more feared than bowmen.

David wasn't bringing a toy to a sword fight. He was bringing a ranged weapon to face an opponent equipped for close combat. Goliath had armor that would stop a sword. He had a shield bearer walking ahead of him. What he didn't have was any way to close the distance before a projectile struck his unprotected face.

The stone hits Goliath in the forehead. He falls face-first into the dirt. David runs forward, takes the giant's own sword, and cuts off his head.

The Philistine army breaks and runs. The Israelites pursue them all the way to the gates of their cities. David keeps Goliath's armor as a trophy and brings the severed head back—eventually, the text says, to Jerusalem.

That last detail contains another clue that this story was edited over time. At this point in the narrative, Jerusalem wasn't an Israelite city. It was controlled by a people called the Jebusites and wouldn't be captured until David himself became king, years later. Someone added that line without noticing the chronological problem.

The Other Giant-Slayer

Now we return to the mystery of Elhanan.

Second Samuel 21 describes a series of battles against Philistine giants—not just one, but several. In verse 19, the Hebrew text states clearly that "Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite."

The name Goliath. The city of Gath. A warrior from Bethlehem. This is unmistakably describing the same event—or rather, a competing tradition about the same event.

Later biblical editors noticed the contradiction and tried to fix it. The Book of Chronicles, written centuries afterward, claims that Elhanan killed someone named "Lahmi, the brother of Goliath." But scholars have figured out where "Lahmi" came from. It's not a real name—it's a piece of the Hebrew word for "Bethlehemite" that got creatively reinterpreted. Someone was doing damage control.

Most scholars today view the Chronicles passage as what they call "an obvious harmonization"—an attempt to paper over an embarrassing inconsistency. The original tradition, they believe, credited Elhanan with the kill. David got the glory later, when storytellers and scribes wanted to give their legendary king a legendary origin.

A Story Borrowed from Homer?

The parallels between David and Goliath and stories from Greek literature are striking enough that scholars have wondered whether Hebrew writers borrowed from Greek sources.

In Homer's Iliad, composed sometime between 760 and 710 BCE, there's a scene where the old warrior Nestor recalls his youth. He tells how he faced a giant named Ereuthalion in single combat. The similarities to the David story are remarkable:

Both giants carry distinctive massive weapons. Both emerge from enemy lines to challenge all comers. Both face armies full of seasoned warriors too afraid to fight. In both stories, the challenge is accepted by the youngest member of his family—Nestor was the twelfth son of his father, David the seventh or eighth son of Jesse.

In both stories, an older authority figure tells the young man he's too inexperienced. In both, divine help enables victory. Both giants end up sprawled on the ground. Both young heroes claim their enemy's equipment as trophies. Both see the enemy army flee in panic. Both return to acclaim from their people.

The resonances are deep enough that some scholars believe Hebrew writers knew Greek heroic traditions and adapted them. Others push back, noting that champion combat and giant-slaying stories appear throughout ancient Near Eastern literature. The Israelites may have been drawing on a common regional storytelling tradition rather than borrowing specifically from Homer.

Archaeological Footnotes

What about the historical Goliath? Did he exist?

Archaeologists have been digging at Tell es-Safi, the ancient site of Gath, for decades. This was indeed one of the major Philistine cities, and excavations confirm it was large and powerful until its destruction in the ninth century BCE—roughly the period when these stories were being composed and compiled.

In the early 2000s, archaeologists found something intriguing: a pottery fragment inscribed with two names, spelled ALWT and WLT. These aren't identical to "Goliath" in Hebrew, but they're linguistically related. The names demonstrate that something like "Goliath" was a real Philistine name in use during the late tenth and early ninth centuries BCE.

The name itself isn't Semitic—it doesn't come from Hebrew or the other languages of ancient Israel's neighbors. Scholars have linked it to Anatolian languages, possibly connecting to the Lydian king Alyattes. One researcher has reconstructed an ancestral form, "Walwatta," which would mean something like "Lion-man." If correct, this places Goliath within Indo-European warrior mythology, fitting for a people who had migrated to Canaan from the Aegean world.

So there may well have been a real Philistine warrior named something like Goliath. Whether he fought David, Elhanan, or someone else entirely, and whether any of them actually killed him—that's beyond what archaeology can tell us.

The Giant in Jewish Tradition

Later Jewish writings elaborate on Goliath in ways that transform him from a military opponent into a figure of cosmic evil.

The Babylonian Talmud, completed around the sixth century CE, makes Goliath a relative of David himself—through the most theologically pointed genealogy imaginable. According to this tradition, Goliath's mother was Orpah, the sister-in-law of Ruth. And Ruth, of course, was David's great-grandmother.

The Book of Ruth tells how Orpah and Ruth both married Israelite men who died in Moab. When their mother-in-law Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, Ruth famously declared her loyalty: "Where you go, I will go." Orpah, after initially accompanying them, turned back to Moab after forty paces.

Ruth's faithfulness led to her becoming an ancestor of King David. Orpah's abandonment, in rabbinic imagination, led to her becoming the mother of Israel's enemies. The Talmud describes her subsequent life in lurid terms, claiming that Goliath was conceived in an act of extraordinary promiscuity—some texts say he had a hundred fathers.

This interpretation serves a theological purpose. It makes the David and Goliath confrontation a family drama, a clash between the descendants of two sisters who made opposite choices. Loyalty to Israel versus betrayal of Israel, played out in single combat.

The Talmud also inflates Goliath's wickedness to cartoonish proportions. His armor weighed sixty tons—or a hundred twenty tons, depending on which rabbi you asked. He personally captured the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to the temple of the Philistine god Dagon. He timed his challenges to morning and evening specifically to disrupt Israelite prayer services. When he died, they found an image of Dagon carved over his heart.

A text called Pseudo-Philo, probably composed around the first century CE, adds an encounter between David and the dying Goliath. David tells the giant to open his eyes and look at his killer. Goliath sees not a boy but an angel, and acknowledges that it wasn't David who killed him but divine power acting through David. This interpretation preserves the theological point: human strength didn't win this battle.

Goliath in Islam

The story appears in the Quran as well, in the second chapter, where Goliath is called Jalut in Arabic. The account is brief, focusing on David and Saul (called Dawud and Talut) and their battle against the Philistines, but the core narrative is recognizable.

Muslim scholars developed their own interpretations. Some traced Goliath's origins to the Amalekites, traditional enemies of Israel. Others expanded him into a kind of symbolic figure representing all the oppressors who persecuted the Israelites before David united the kingdom.

One particularly interesting interpretation views the battle with Goliath as a prefiguration of the Prophet Muhammad's Battle of Badr in 624 CE, when a small band of early Muslims defeated a much larger Meccan force. In this reading, Goliath becomes a prototype for the enemies Muhammad faced—powerful, seemingly invincible, ultimately brought down by divine will working through apparent underdogs.

The Phrase That Outlived the Story

"David and Goliath" has become one of those biblical phrases that escaped its religious context entirely.

When a newspaper describes a startup battling a tech giant, when a sports commentator discusses a low-ranked team facing champions, when a documentary filmmaker examines a small community fighting a corporation—the metaphor appears. The phrase has become shorthand for any situation where the smaller, weaker party confronts the larger, stronger one.

But here's what gets lost in translation. The original story wasn't really about size or odds. It was about the source of power.

David's speech before the battle makes this explicit. He doesn't say, "I'm clever and he's slow." He doesn't say, "My weapon has better range." He says that the battle belongs to God, that divine power makes human advantage irrelevant. Goliath trusted in bronze and iron. Saul trusted in bronze and iron. David trusted in something else, and that trust was the point.

Theology professor Leonard Greenspoon has noted the irony: modern usage almost always emphasizes the underdog angle while ignoring the theological content. We like the "little guy wins" narrative. We're less interested in the claim that victory came through divine intervention rather than human cleverness.

Then again, perhaps that selective reading is appropriate. The story has always been adaptable, always been available for reinterpretation. It meant one thing to the scribes who first wrote it down as anti-Saul propaganda. It meant something else to the rabbis who made Goliath a symbol of cosmic wickedness. It meant something different again to Muslim scholars who saw it prefiguring Muhammad's battles.

Today it means whatever we need it to mean: that power isn't always what it appears, that the odds don't tell the whole story, that sometimes the shepherd boy wins.

Even if, in the original telling, the shepherd boy might have been named Elhanan.

What Remains

Somewhere in the Valley of Elah, perhaps three thousand years ago, something happened. A battle, a challenge, a moment that passed into memory and then into story.

By the time scribes wrote it down, centuries later, the account was already layered with meaning: political propaganda against a failed king, theological claims about divine power, echoes of Greek heroic poetry, folk memories of real Philistine warriors with strange Anatolian names.

The story was revised and re-revised. Details were added, contradictions papered over, giants multiplied and given increasingly impossible proportions. One hero was quietly replaced by another. The result is a text that scholars can dissect endlessly without fully resolving its mysteries.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing is that the story survived at all—and thrived. Three millennia later, people who have never read the Bible know what "David and Goliath" means. The phrase has escaped its origins to become something universal, a template for understanding the countless moments when the apparently weak confront the apparently strong.

That's a kind of immortality that Goliath, for all his size and armor, never achieved. The giant is remembered only for his defeat.